Migrating databases from one server to another is a pain: mysqldump on old server -> gzip -> scp big dump file -> gunzip -> mysql. It takes a long time, and is very manual and (and thus error-prone), and generally has the stink of “lame” hanging about it.

Alan Gutierrez compares Sourceforge and Github. In short: Sourceforge is for projects, while Github is a place to put your code. It doesn’t have to be a full project. It doesn’t have to work. It’s just a way to share your code with other hackers who might be interested. And they can fork it and start collaborating.

Some of us, including me, dreamed of completely “free” software environments before the public launch of FSF not for abstract moral reasons or because of some soi-disant social problem, but because the conditions of our craft were intolerable to us. We were suffocating, being ground down into unfeeling cogs taught by repeated pain that we must not care about our art because to care was to lose.

Want to fire off a quick email from your Ruby script? Finding ActionMailer to be overkill, but Net::SMTP to be…um, underkill? Envious of PHP’s mail(), which sends an email with a single function call?

Ever want to store some metrics from an app, and later graph the results? I often do. Stuff like: number of users, number of daily orders, or number of tickets closed per week.

Some tidbits from Producing Open Source Software by Karl Fogel:

Not big news, but a few folks have bugged me recently to make it easier to contribute patches to some of our gems and plugins. So here you are: the Heroku client gem and yaml_db.